April 14, 2010 • 18 mins
When the philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg sought mechanical explanations for nature, he found himself struggling with his faith as he searched for evidence of the human soul. But what happened next? Tune in and learn more in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy and we have
been spending an awful lot of time in Italy lately
because of our Medici super series. So today we thought
(00:23):
we'd move a little further north to Sweden and our
subject for today is going to be Emmanuel Swedenborg, who
was famously called by the philosopher D. T. Suzuki the
Buddha of the North, and he was a mechanical genius
who began his whole body of work by looking for
mechanical explanations for nature, so a mechanical explanation for the
(00:47):
physical world. And from there he began to study the
soul as it related to the human body. And he
was quite advanced for his time as far as science goes.
He had anatomical theory ease that weren't proven until the
late nineteenth century. And we're talking about a seventeenth century guy. Yeah,
But what makes him truly interesting is that, well in
(01:08):
the midst of all these studies about the soul, he
has a crisis of faith and abandons his scientific pursuits altogether,
and he spends the rest of his life trying to
explicate the scriptures, and his followers end up founding a
church in his name. So this is our our subject
for today, so let's go back to his roots. He
(01:29):
was born January twenty nine, six eighty eight, in Stockholm
as Emmanuel Swedenburgh. His father, Jasper was a Swedish clergyman
at court chaplain and also a professor of theology who
later became the Bishop of Skara, and their family was
in nobled, which is my current favorite word in seventeen nineteen,
and that's when they took the name Swedenborg, and the
(01:52):
young Emmanuel studied philosophy at the University of Uppsala and
spent five years abroad he was This becomes a common
theme in his life of going abroad and uh learning
lots of new things. But for this first trip he
becomes interested in mathematics and natural sciences and pursues study
in England and Holland, France and Germany learning mechanical skills.
(02:15):
Even when he's in England, he moves in uh Newton's circles,
and he was a bit of a da vinci esque genius.
He's a real mechanical hot shot. He thought up new
ways to make docs, had some vague ideas about submarines
in the airplane, which Sarah mentioned. It was a good
thing he didn't stick to this. If you remember our
Bungled Flight Attempts episodes, was a high point for bungle
(02:38):
flight attempts, and he even had some ideas about a
machine gun. But when he returns to Sweden in seventeen fifteen,
he starts to publish the Dadalist Hyperborous, which is Sweden's
first scientific journal, and there he's able to write about
mechanical inventions and discoveries, and all of his work in
the mechanical sciences really starts to impress King Charles the twelfth,
(02:59):
who make him an assistant to one of the biggest
names in Swedish mechanical science at the time, and he
gets a position at the Royal Board of Minds and
he later becomes an assessor there. But this is his
day job, so imagine through almost all of the writings
we're gonna be talking about later in the podcast, this
is what he's doing for most of his time working
(03:20):
at the mines, improving the country's mining industry and mining
was a huge pursuit and Sweden at the time. So
he goes home from his day of mining science and
works on the other sciences and philosophy, everything from cosmology
and puscular philosophy to math and human sensory perceptions. He
(03:40):
does the first work on algebra in the Swedish language,
lots of stuff on chemistry and physics, and he's a
bit of a jack of all trades. He even spends
some of his time composing poems in Latin, so he
apparently did more in his downtime than I do. We're
going to catch up with him at his second major
trip abroad. So a few years after he's ennobled in
(04:01):
seventeen nineteen, he goes abroad again and he publishes some
works on natural philosophy and chemistry. But then he doesn't
write much for about ten years, and it's clear that
when he starts again in seventeen thirty three, he's been
reading a lot and thinking a lot. He goes on
his third European tour and just goes crazy with the publishing,
(04:22):
and this is when he switches from thinking about inventions
and starts thinking about the mechanical ways to explain nature
that we've mentioned before. He publishes philosophical and logical works.
The first folio is called Principle of Natural Things, and
in this work he comes pretty close to things that
modern science comes up with much later. For instance, he
(04:45):
has a theory that is very close to what we
know about the atom with a nucleus and electrons, and
also an idea that's very close to the Conte Laplace
nebular theory that the suns and planets form a common
nebulas so a man ahead of his time time. But
then his course of study changes again and he starts
to switch towards studying the soul as related to the body.
(05:08):
He goes home in seventeen thirty four, and his father
dies in seventeen thirty five, and he takes a leave
of absence from his assessor job at the Minds and
starts to travel again. This time he goes to France
and Italy and Holland and he writes the Economy Regney
in Amale's which is translated as the Economy of the
Animal Kingdom, and returns to Stockholm. Although I read one
(05:30):
thing that was interesting, that's not the best translation for
that title. It's kind of misleading. He means the kingdom
of the animal or soul when he says Regney in Amali,
not the animal kingdom, which is what he might think
when you first read that. Um. So another translation you
(05:50):
could kind of think of as the biological bases of
the soul, right, the less literal translation. And this work
draws Swedenborg closer to the study of the body. He
studies human anatomy and physiology, but he's also beginning to
think about the study of the soul, specifically trying to
prove the immortality of the soul to the senses themselves.
(06:13):
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, and he has a really excellent
understanding of the cerebral cortexes role it's sensory, motor, and
cognitive functions. Um most people thought it didn't really have
a purpose. It was just kind of a leftover. Even
cortex means rind, so people really thought it was the
brain rind, which gives you an idea of of the
(06:36):
common thought. At the time, he realizes this is something
important and it's where he's going to start in his
search for the soul. He also considered the pituitary gland
to be the crown of the brain, which is a
pretty revolutionary thought for the time. And he figured all
of this out by basically reading and studying the work
of other scientists. He didn't report much on his own
(06:59):
experiment um, but he didn't just read their analysis of
their own work. He looked at their experiments and looked
at all of the stuff that they found and drew
his own conclusions. And that's how he was able to
come up with these ideas that were, um so different
from what everybody else was thinking at the time. And
(07:20):
you might think that these ideas would be very exciting
to the medical and scientific community, but you would be wrong.
His anatomical studies weren't given much heed, and according to
an article by Charles G. Gross in The Neuroscientist, this
is because these little nuggets of scientific brilliance were embedded
in these huge books he wrote about the soul. And
(07:42):
you know, by the point they were available, he had
the reputation of a mystic, so you might be less
inclined to listen. Yeah. Well, and also he's not a professor.
He's not working with people who are going to read
and review his work. Um, there there wouldn't be a
strong reason for a temporary scientists to even read what
he was writing. But by the time that all these
(08:05):
works kind of really came out there in the late
nineteenth century, scholars started looking at these ideas, especially these
ideas about the brain, and realizing, oh, my gosh, we
just figured this stuff out recently. And he had he
had ideas for this back in the seventeen hundreds, but
after the economy he got to work on more studies
(08:26):
of anatomy and the soul. But Um, these things were
brought to a halt by a religious crisis. So he
started a new travel journal in July of seventeen forty three.
It's basic, you know, kind of banal, everyday kind of entries,
and then suddenly it turns into this dream journal that's
(08:46):
known as the Journal of Dreams Um, detailing recall dreams
and nighttime spiritual experiences from March to October seventeen forty four,
and some of these are surprisingly most pornographic and embarrassed
later more prudish Victorian readers, you know. In April seventh,
(09:08):
seventeen forty four, he has this first vision of Christ,
which makes him feel a little better about the temptation
of intellectual pride, which was just getting him down, I guess,
And by April seventeen forty five he had received a
definitive call to abandon worldly learning. Um. So that's the
end of his work in the natural sciences. So that
(09:30):
brings us to his theological work, which is a bit dense. Basically,
God called him, according to him, to explain the spiritual
meaning of Scripture. So Swedenborg started writing about angels, Paradise
and the Last Judgment as well as the New Jerusalem.
He was kind of like an old school prophet, is
(09:50):
what Sarah and I compared him to. And from then
on he he gets into Bible interpretation in relating the
world of spirits and angels, and he writes thirty volumes
in Latin. Most of his works are anonymous, and he
does them from seventeen forty nine to seventeen seventy one. UM.
His best known theological work is on Heaven and Its
(10:11):
Wonders and on Hell, and his final work is True
Christian Religion. Um. But he says he's gotten into this,
you know, new vocation because of a divine vision and call.
And Encyclopedia Britannica again says that his spiritual senses were
opened so that he might be in the spiritual world
(10:31):
as consciously as in the material world. And the thirty
volumes he really writes them as God's revelations. He wanted
to enter um a new age of truth and reason
to religion, and he thought that these new revelations of
his that he was putting down were the Second Coming.
And anything that's as broad as a religion is difficult
(10:55):
to get a grasp on and and distill into something
as short as a podcas past. So we thought it
would be a good idea to talk with someone who's
well versed in the Swedenborgian religion, and so we talked
to Lisa Oz, who was raised as a Swedenborgian, and
introduced her husband, doctor Oz, to the religion as well.
And we wanted to start by better understanding Swedenborg's epiphany,
(11:19):
since clearly this was the defining experience in his life.
So that's where we started. Hello, I am Lisa Oz,
author of Us Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships that matter Most.
From my understanding of his epiphany, it seemed like it
was something overnight, but it was a while in coming
in terms of the preparation for this what we as
(11:42):
Swedenborgians UM like to see as a spiritual opening of
his of his of his eyes, as opening with spiritual
eyes and being able to see into the spiritual dimension.
He had studied. UM obviously studied religion very UM closely,
from very a very early age, and UM also practiced
(12:05):
breathing techniques. He had started journaling his dreams UM of
the year before his spiritual awakening. UM. So it wasn't
that it was just out of the blue. One day
he was a scientist and the next day he was
a theologian. He had wrote written extensively on religion and
philosophy and tried to find a connection to the spiritual
(12:27):
in the human brain. He was looking for the seat
of the soul. So there was a lot of preparation
leading up to his epiphany. And UM, what I find
particularly entertaining for me was that the first UM, the
first communication he had with the spiritual world directly was
someone telling him not to eat so much, which I
(12:49):
think is really relevant in my own life. Lisa went
on to explain that this epiphany didn't stifle sweden Words
traditional life. He still carried out his duties as a
member of the aristocracy, Mr ennobled Man, and he didn't
become a recluse as you might imagine a mystic, would
you know. When I think of a mystic, I usually
(13:10):
think of someone who's kind of hidden away from the world,
say at a convent, yeah, or a dude living in
a cave. But he wasn't a recluse. Um, he was
a mystic, however, And since the definition of mystic can
be a bit of a controversial one when talking about
sweden Worg, we are we asked a Swedenborgian to explain
(13:31):
what she thought he was mystical. Um. I think that
mystical experience is one where you have a direct experience
of the Numenus. And that was exactly what sweden Worg
was describing. It was for most of us who do
not have mystical experiences, we have to take it on
someone else's word that this other realm exists. So Emmanuel
(13:56):
Swedenborg spent the rest of his life working on uh
these theological writings, and he dies in London in seventeen
seventy two. But despite never preaching, he stuck solely to
writing Lesley in Latin. The first sweden Borgian Society start
popping up in the seventeen eighties, and the Church of
the New Jerusalem is founded in London later in that decade.
(14:19):
And one of the most interesting things about this guy
is how his ideas inspired writers like ball Back, Baudelaire, Emerson, Yates,
the Brownings, Blake Coleridge, Henry James, Sr. The Philosopher, even
Helen Keller. We're not talking about some obscure historical figure.
He was actually a very influential person. And that led
(14:43):
us to question ourselves as to why we had never
heard of this man and didn't know who he was.
So we asked Lisa a little bit about how he's
influenced contemporary thought. Yeah, and she's said that some of
the impact of sweden Bor on contemporary spiritual thought is
indirect and it comes through all of those writers that
(15:05):
we can be reading almost a distilled version of his
ideas in some of their works. Um, but well, he
was influential in indirect ways. We were also curious about
why his church doesn't have a bigger presence today. I
think mostly there's not a large swing where in church
today because there's no impetus to to convert or proselytize
(15:29):
because we just don't care. It doesn't matter if people
are other religions. As long as they're living a life
of love and compassion and connection and relationship, that's great.
And so I think that there's not that movement to
spread the church. The other thing is that sweden works
writings are not easy. There. It is thousands and thousands
(15:50):
of pages. I think it's thirtiesome volumes of very dense
translated from the latin um, heavy material, and it's not
the kind of thing you can just pick up and say, well,
all this makes sense. And if you're looking for a
good place to start with some of Swedenborg's works, because
again it is dense. We've tried to read some of
it and had a difficult time. Lisa told us her
(16:12):
favorite of his many works was Arcana Celestia, and you know,
he does write like a scientist. It's it's dry and
it's to the point. But he also sees some of
Scripture as I guess we'd say, parables for your spiritual journey.
She also gave us a word to the wise about Swedenborg.
He's a man of his time, and for example, his
(16:34):
views toward women wouldn't seem particularly enlightened and certainly not
as enlightened as the rest of his scientific work. Um,
but you know, just to consider his historical context when
reading his works, and we were saying, it's just so interesting.
It's always interesting to see someone who's so fully engaged
(16:55):
in both science and religion. It was equal interest in both,
although it's also interesting that he felt he couldn't do
them at the same time, because after all, he did
drop science as an ego driven pursuit, at least for him.
But it's also so interesting that science he couldn't drop
it completely. He may have stopped his scientific writings, but
(17:16):
science is clearly influencing his theological work. Right. It reminded
me of a book I was reading, John Horgan's Rational Mysticism,
which tries to impose a sort of rational scientific framework
on top of the idea of mysticism, which is guess
something that Swedenborg also did. Fortunately for you guys, we
have some really great articles on the brain and on
(17:39):
religion written by our own Molly Edmunds of stuff Mom
never told you. The first is the brain hardwired for religion,
and the second is morality located in the brain, And
you can find both of these on our home page
at www. Dot how Stuff Works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, does it how
(17:59):
Stuff work dot com And be sure to check out
the Stuff you missed in History Class blog on the
house stuff Works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Downy and we have
been spending an awful lot of time in Italy lately
because of our Medici super series. So today we thought
(00:23):
we'd move a little further north to Sweden and our
subject for today is going to be Emmanuel Swedenborg, who
was famously called by the philosopher D. T. Suzuki the
Buddha of the North, and he was a mechanical genius
who began his whole body of work by looking for
mechanical explanations for nature, so a mechanical explanation for the
(00:47):
physical world. And from there he began to study the
soul as it related to the human body. And he
was quite advanced for his time as far as science goes.
He had anatomical theory ease that weren't proven until the
late nineteenth century. And we're talking about a seventeenth century guy. Yeah,
But what makes him truly interesting is that, well in
(01:08):
the midst of all these studies about the soul, he
has a crisis of faith and abandons his scientific pursuits altogether,
and he spends the rest of his life trying to
explicate the scriptures, and his followers end up founding a
church in his name. So this is our our subject
for today, so let's go back to his roots. He
(01:29):
was born January twenty nine, six eighty eight, in Stockholm
as Emmanuel Swedenburgh. His father, Jasper was a Swedish clergyman
at court chaplain and also a professor of theology who
later became the Bishop of Skara, and their family was
in nobled, which is my current favorite word in seventeen nineteen,
and that's when they took the name Swedenborg, and the
(01:52):
young Emmanuel studied philosophy at the University of Uppsala and
spent five years abroad he was This becomes a common
theme in his life of going abroad and uh learning
lots of new things. But for this first trip he
becomes interested in mathematics and natural sciences and pursues study
in England and Holland, France and Germany learning mechanical skills.
(02:15):
Even when he's in England, he moves in uh Newton's circles,
and he was a bit of a da vinci esque genius.
He's a real mechanical hot shot. He thought up new
ways to make docs, had some vague ideas about submarines
in the airplane, which Sarah mentioned. It was a good
thing he didn't stick to this. If you remember our
Bungled Flight Attempts episodes, was a high point for bungle
(02:38):
flight attempts, and he even had some ideas about a
machine gun. But when he returns to Sweden in seventeen fifteen,
he starts to publish the Dadalist Hyperborous, which is Sweden's
first scientific journal, and there he's able to write about
mechanical inventions and discoveries, and all of his work in
the mechanical sciences really starts to impress King Charles the twelfth,
(02:59):
who make him an assistant to one of the biggest
names in Swedish mechanical science at the time, and he
gets a position at the Royal Board of Minds and
he later becomes an assessor there. But this is his
day job, so imagine through almost all of the writings
we're gonna be talking about later in the podcast, this
is what he's doing for most of his time working
(03:20):
at the mines, improving the country's mining industry and mining
was a huge pursuit and Sweden at the time. So
he goes home from his day of mining science and
works on the other sciences and philosophy, everything from cosmology
and puscular philosophy to math and human sensory perceptions. He
(03:40):
does the first work on algebra in the Swedish language,
lots of stuff on chemistry and physics, and he's a
bit of a jack of all trades. He even spends
some of his time composing poems in Latin, so he
apparently did more in his downtime than I do. We're
going to catch up with him at his second major
trip abroad. So a few years after he's ennobled in
(04:01):
seventeen nineteen, he goes abroad again and he publishes some
works on natural philosophy and chemistry. But then he doesn't
write much for about ten years, and it's clear that
when he starts again in seventeen thirty three, he's been
reading a lot and thinking a lot. He goes on
his third European tour and just goes crazy with the publishing,
(04:22):
and this is when he switches from thinking about inventions
and starts thinking about the mechanical ways to explain nature
that we've mentioned before. He publishes philosophical and logical works.
The first folio is called Principle of Natural Things, and
in this work he comes pretty close to things that
modern science comes up with much later. For instance, he
(04:45):
has a theory that is very close to what we
know about the atom with a nucleus and electrons, and
also an idea that's very close to the Conte Laplace
nebular theory that the suns and planets form a common
nebulas so a man ahead of his time time. But
then his course of study changes again and he starts
to switch towards studying the soul as related to the body.
(05:08):
He goes home in seventeen thirty four, and his father
dies in seventeen thirty five, and he takes a leave
of absence from his assessor job at the Minds and
starts to travel again. This time he goes to France
and Italy and Holland and he writes the Economy Regney
in Amale's which is translated as the Economy of the
Animal Kingdom, and returns to Stockholm. Although I read one
(05:30):
thing that was interesting, that's not the best translation for
that title. It's kind of misleading. He means the kingdom
of the animal or soul when he says Regney in Amali,
not the animal kingdom, which is what he might think
when you first read that. Um. So another translation you
(05:50):
could kind of think of as the biological bases of
the soul, right, the less literal translation. And this work
draws Swedenborg closer to the study of the body. He
studies human anatomy and physiology, but he's also beginning to
think about the study of the soul, specifically trying to
prove the immortality of the soul to the senses themselves.
(06:13):
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, and he has a really excellent
understanding of the cerebral cortexes role it's sensory, motor, and
cognitive functions. Um most people thought it didn't really have
a purpose. It was just kind of a leftover. Even
cortex means rind, so people really thought it was the
brain rind, which gives you an idea of of the
(06:36):
common thought. At the time, he realizes this is something
important and it's where he's going to start in his
search for the soul. He also considered the pituitary gland
to be the crown of the brain, which is a
pretty revolutionary thought for the time. And he figured all
of this out by basically reading and studying the work
of other scientists. He didn't report much on his own
(06:59):
experiment um, but he didn't just read their analysis of
their own work. He looked at their experiments and looked
at all of the stuff that they found and drew
his own conclusions. And that's how he was able to
come up with these ideas that were, um so different
from what everybody else was thinking at the time. And
(07:20):
you might think that these ideas would be very exciting
to the medical and scientific community, but you would be wrong.
His anatomical studies weren't given much heed, and according to
an article by Charles G. Gross in The Neuroscientist, this
is because these little nuggets of scientific brilliance were embedded
in these huge books he wrote about the soul. And
(07:42):
you know, by the point they were available, he had
the reputation of a mystic, so you might be less
inclined to listen. Yeah. Well, and also he's not a professor.
He's not working with people who are going to read
and review his work. Um, there there wouldn't be a
strong reason for a temporary scientists to even read what
he was writing. But by the time that all these
(08:05):
works kind of really came out there in the late
nineteenth century, scholars started looking at these ideas, especially these
ideas about the brain, and realizing, oh, my gosh, we
just figured this stuff out recently. And he had he
had ideas for this back in the seventeen hundreds, but
after the economy he got to work on more studies
(08:26):
of anatomy and the soul. But Um, these things were
brought to a halt by a religious crisis. So he
started a new travel journal in July of seventeen forty three.
It's basic, you know, kind of banal, everyday kind of entries,
and then suddenly it turns into this dream journal that's
(08:46):
known as the Journal of Dreams Um, detailing recall dreams
and nighttime spiritual experiences from March to October seventeen forty four,
and some of these are surprisingly most pornographic and embarrassed
later more prudish Victorian readers, you know. In April seventh,
(09:08):
seventeen forty four, he has this first vision of Christ,
which makes him feel a little better about the temptation
of intellectual pride, which was just getting him down, I guess,
And by April seventeen forty five he had received a
definitive call to abandon worldly learning. Um. So that's the
end of his work in the natural sciences. So that
(09:30):
brings us to his theological work, which is a bit dense. Basically,
God called him, according to him, to explain the spiritual
meaning of Scripture. So Swedenborg started writing about angels, Paradise
and the Last Judgment as well as the New Jerusalem.
He was kind of like an old school prophet, is
(09:50):
what Sarah and I compared him to. And from then
on he he gets into Bible interpretation in relating the
world of spirits and angels, and he writes thirty volumes
in Latin. Most of his works are anonymous, and he
does them from seventeen forty nine to seventeen seventy one. UM.
His best known theological work is on Heaven and Its
(10:11):
Wonders and on Hell, and his final work is True
Christian Religion. Um. But he says he's gotten into this,
you know, new vocation because of a divine vision and call.
And Encyclopedia Britannica again says that his spiritual senses were
opened so that he might be in the spiritual world
(10:31):
as consciously as in the material world. And the thirty
volumes he really writes them as God's revelations. He wanted
to enter um a new age of truth and reason
to religion, and he thought that these new revelations of
his that he was putting down were the Second Coming.
And anything that's as broad as a religion is difficult
(10:55):
to get a grasp on and and distill into something
as short as a podcas past. So we thought it
would be a good idea to talk with someone who's
well versed in the Swedenborgian religion, and so we talked
to Lisa Oz, who was raised as a Swedenborgian, and
introduced her husband, doctor Oz, to the religion as well.
And we wanted to start by better understanding Swedenborg's epiphany,
(11:19):
since clearly this was the defining experience in his life.
So that's where we started. Hello, I am Lisa Oz,
author of Us Transforming Ourselves and the Relationships that matter Most.
From my understanding of his epiphany, it seemed like it
was something overnight, but it was a while in coming
in terms of the preparation for this what we as
(11:42):
Swedenborgians UM like to see as a spiritual opening of
his of his of his eyes, as opening with spiritual
eyes and being able to see into the spiritual dimension.
He had studied. UM obviously studied religion very UM closely,
from very a very early age, and UM also practiced
(12:05):
breathing techniques. He had started journaling his dreams UM of
the year before his spiritual awakening. UM. So it wasn't
that it was just out of the blue. One day
he was a scientist and the next day he was
a theologian. He had wrote written extensively on religion and
philosophy and tried to find a connection to the spiritual
(12:27):
in the human brain. He was looking for the seat
of the soul. So there was a lot of preparation
leading up to his epiphany. And UM, what I find
particularly entertaining for me was that the first UM, the
first communication he had with the spiritual world directly was
someone telling him not to eat so much, which I
(12:49):
think is really relevant in my own life. Lisa went
on to explain that this epiphany didn't stifle sweden Words
traditional life. He still carried out his duties as a
member of the aristocracy, Mr ennobled Man, and he didn't
become a recluse as you might imagine a mystic, would
you know. When I think of a mystic, I usually
(13:10):
think of someone who's kind of hidden away from the world,
say at a convent, yeah, or a dude living in
a cave. But he wasn't a recluse. Um, he was
a mystic, however, And since the definition of mystic can
be a bit of a controversial one when talking about
sweden Worg, we are we asked a Swedenborgian to explain
(13:31):
what she thought he was mystical. Um. I think that
mystical experience is one where you have a direct experience
of the Numenus. And that was exactly what sweden Worg
was describing. It was for most of us who do
not have mystical experiences, we have to take it on
someone else's word that this other realm exists. So Emmanuel
(13:56):
Swedenborg spent the rest of his life working on uh
these theological writings, and he dies in London in seventeen
seventy two. But despite never preaching, he stuck solely to
writing Lesley in Latin. The first sweden Borgian Society start
popping up in the seventeen eighties, and the Church of
the New Jerusalem is founded in London later in that decade.
(14:19):
And one of the most interesting things about this guy
is how his ideas inspired writers like ball Back, Baudelaire, Emerson, Yates,
the Brownings, Blake Coleridge, Henry James, Sr. The Philosopher, even
Helen Keller. We're not talking about some obscure historical figure.
He was actually a very influential person. And that led
(14:43):
us to question ourselves as to why we had never
heard of this man and didn't know who he was.
So we asked Lisa a little bit about how he's
influenced contemporary thought. Yeah, and she's said that some of
the impact of sweden Bor on contemporary spiritual thought is
indirect and it comes through all of those writers that
(15:05):
we can be reading almost a distilled version of his
ideas in some of their works. Um, but well, he
was influential in indirect ways. We were also curious about
why his church doesn't have a bigger presence today. I
think mostly there's not a large swing where in church
today because there's no impetus to to convert or proselytize
(15:29):
because we just don't care. It doesn't matter if people
are other religions. As long as they're living a life
of love and compassion and connection and relationship, that's great.
And so I think that there's not that movement to
spread the church. The other thing is that sweden works
writings are not easy. There. It is thousands and thousands
(15:50):
of pages. I think it's thirtiesome volumes of very dense
translated from the latin um, heavy material, and it's not
the kind of thing you can just pick up and say, well,
all this makes sense. And if you're looking for a
good place to start with some of Swedenborg's works, because
again it is dense. We've tried to read some of
it and had a difficult time. Lisa told us her
(16:12):
favorite of his many works was Arcana Celestia, and you know,
he does write like a scientist. It's it's dry and
it's to the point. But he also sees some of
Scripture as I guess we'd say, parables for your spiritual journey.
She also gave us a word to the wise about Swedenborg.
He's a man of his time, and for example, his
(16:34):
views toward women wouldn't seem particularly enlightened and certainly not
as enlightened as the rest of his scientific work. Um,
but you know, just to consider his historical context when
reading his works, and we were saying, it's just so interesting.
It's always interesting to see someone who's so fully engaged
(16:55):
in both science and religion. It was equal interest in both,
although it's also interesting that he felt he couldn't do
them at the same time, because after all, he did
drop science as an ego driven pursuit, at least for him.
But it's also so interesting that science he couldn't drop
it completely. He may have stopped his scientific writings, but
(17:16):
science is clearly influencing his theological work. Right. It reminded
me of a book I was reading, John Horgan's Rational Mysticism,
which tries to impose a sort of rational scientific framework
on top of the idea of mysticism, which is guess
something that Swedenborg also did. Fortunately for you guys, we
have some really great articles on the brain and on
(17:39):
religion written by our own Molly Edmunds of stuff Mom
never told you. The first is the brain hardwired for religion,
and the second is morality located in the brain, And
you can find both of these on our home page
at www. Dot how Stuff Works dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, does it how
(17:59):
Stuff work dot com And be sure to check out
the Stuff you missed in History Class blog on the
house stuff Works dot com home page
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